The wind and sea arose during the night, causing the ship to roll in a reckless fashion. Yet the celebration of New Year's Eve was not marred, and lusty choruses came up from the ward-room till long after midnight. Next morning at breakfast our ranks had noticeably thinned through the liveliness of the ship, but it is wonderful how large an assembly we mustered for the New Year's dinner, and how cheerfully the toast was drunk to "The best year we have ever had!"
On January 2, 1914, fast ice and the mainland were sighted. The course was changed to the south-west so as to bring the ship within a girdle of loose ice disposed in big solid chunks and small pinnacled floes. A sounding realized two hundred fathoms some ten miles off the coast, which stretched like a lofty bank of yellow sand along the southern horizon. On previous occasions we had not been able to see so much of the coastline in this longitude owing to the compactness of the ice, and so we were able to definitely chart a longer tract at the western limit of Adelie Land.
The ice became so thick and heavy as the 'Aurora' pressed southward that she was forced at last to put about and steer for more open water. On the way, a sounding was made in two hundred and fifty fathoms, but a dredging was unsuccessful owing to the fact that insufficient cable was paid out in going from two hundred and fifty fathoms to deeper water.
Our north-westerly course ran among a great number of very long tabular bergs, which suggested the possibility of a neighbouring glacier-tongue as their origin.
At ten o'clock on the evening of the 2nd, a mountain of ice with a high encircling bastion passed to starboard. It rose to a peak, flanked by fragments toppling in snowy ruin. The pyramidal summit was tinged the palest lilac in the waning light; the mighty pallid walls were streaked and blotched with deep azure; the green swell sucked and thundered in the wave-worn caverns. Chaste snow-birds swam through the pure air, and the whole scene was sacred.
A tropical day in the pack-ice! Sunday January 4 was clear and perfectly still, and the sun shone powerfully. On the previous day we had entered a wide field of ice which had become so close and heavy that the ship took till late in the evening to reach its northern fringe.
From January 5 onwards for two weeks we steamed steadily towards the west, repeatedly changing course to double great sheets of pack which streamed away to the north, pushing through them in other places where the welcome "water-sky showed strong" ahead, making "southing" for days following the trend of the ice, then grappling with it in the hope of winning through to the land and at last returning to the western track along the margin of brash which breaks the first swell of the Southern Ocean.
The weather was mostly overcast with random showers of light snow and mild variable winds on all but two days, when there was a "blow" of forty miles per hour and a considerable sea in which the ship seemed more active than usual.
Many soundings were taken, and their value lay in broadly [...] Of course, too, we were supplementing the ship's previous work in these latitudes.
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